Hey. Could we do that again? I know we haven't met, but I don't want to be an ant. You know?

Tuesday, 19 February 2013

Film as Faith

Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew

In her excellent piece on Pasolini's The Gospel According to St Matthew in this month's Sight & Sound magazine, Hannah
McGill writes the following:

Christ's miracles are rendered
not with smart special effects or coy evasions, but with crude cuts; somehow
the refusal to attempt to fool us emphasises rather than reduces the sense of
magic. The sheer scale of what the Gospels ask a true believer to accept is
rendered unavoidable.

This eloquent passage got me
thinking about how, in a sense, filmmakers ask their audience – their true believers – to accept as true
what's on the screen before them. If miracles, by definition, ask us to believe
in the impossible, is then cinema itself a miracle? Or, to put it another way,
is cinema an art (an act) of faith? Is it, in a sense, inherently a 'religious'
medium?

Just as all these thoughts were flying through my mind, a friend posted this on Facebook:

'It is as though movies answered
an ancient quest for the common unconscious. They fulfil a spiritual need that
people have to share a common memory' – Martin Scorsese

The idea that films fulfil a
spiritual need seemed to chime exactly with the point I was trying to grasp. I
Googled the quote and found it to be from A
Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. Pulling the
book off my shelf, I located the quote, and found this preceding it:

I don't
really see a conflict between the church and the movies, the sacred and the
profane. Obviously, there are major differences, but I can also see great
similarities between a church and a movie house. Both are places for people to
come together and share a common experience. I believe there is a spirituality
in films, even if it's not one that can supplant faith. (page 166).

Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ

With this in mind, I wonder
how much of a leap it is to see a love of cinema as a faith. If we can acknowledge that holy leaders and filmmakers
alike ask us to believe in the impossible, that both film and religion fulfil a
spiritual need, and that they are both practised in houses of worship, am I
really going too far to posit cinephilia as a form of faith? Of religion?

Throughout all of this, there
is but one image burnt into my mind: the resurrection in Ordet. Where else has the act of the dead returning to life been
rendered with such heart-wrenching believability? With such straight-laced
conviction that the figures on the screen seem more real than reality itself?
We don't just believe in the miracle,
we believe in miracles, the miracle
of life – the life of those on screen, our life, life on earth. Cinema made
flesh, flesh made spirit. Transcendence.

Dreyer's Ordet

Back in 2007, I wrote the
following in my Director's Journal for Life
Just Is:

Reading Kazantzakis, I think
I've realised why I'm interested in religion: it's because religious people
have blind faith. They believe unconditionally. To believe in anything that
wholeheartedly must be comforting.

Six years later, I realise I do believe in something that wholeheartedly.
I believe in cinema.